What do the “hue” and “color” controls do?
ANSWER. The color TV hue control shifts the phase of the burst signal. When you shift the burst signal, you change all the colors. By the way, burst is what the TV’s reference oscillator syncs to. While decoding the chroma, the demodulators use the oscillator signal as a beat frequency. The TV reference oscillator is where the famous 3.58 MHz color crystals come from. We hams use those for transmitting on the 80 meter band. Of course, you need one for a color adapter, too. Some TVs call “hue” something else. “Tint,” usually. The color or “saturation” control in a color TV is a contrast control for the chroma signal. The control usually adjusts the level of the chroma signal into the demodulators. The demodulators get the signal from the last chroma amplifier. Col-R-Tel doesn’t have chroma amplifiers before the demodulator. In Col-R-Tel, the saturation control is at the demodulator stage. Because Col-R-Tel’s field-sequential, it only has one demodulator instead of two.
